How Often Are Snowflake Bills Generated?
If you’re reeling from Snowflake sticker shock, you’re probably wondering: how often are Snowflake bills generated? Because it makes a huge difference whether you’re billed every month, quarter, or year.
First, we’ll answer the question you’re asking: Snowflake bills are generated on a monthly basis.
But since we have you here, let’s talk about that question. If you’re asking how often your Snowflake bills are generated, that bill is probably higher than expected. So if you want insights into how to keep your Snowflake costs under control, you’ll definitely want to keep reading.
How often are Snowflake bills generated—and how does billing work?
Every month, Snowflake generates a Snowflake Order Form, a monthly usage statement for customers with at least one active contract. Snowflake itemizes usage for the month as expressed in credits consumed and currency spent.
In addition to your monthly consumption and spend, your Snowflake Order Form will give you a summary of usage during the life of your contract. Only users with ACCOUNTADMIN and ORGADMIN roles will be allowed to view your order form.
How to interpret your Snowflake bill
When you get your first Snowflake bill, it can be a bit confusing. Snowflake pricing is multi-faceted, and has several moving pieces that can be difficult to parse. To understand the components of your Snowflake bill, we first need to walk through how Snowflake pricing works.
Snowflake pricing is determined by three usage categories: data storage, data transfer, and compute resources.
Data storage
Snowflake charges for data storage on a flat rate per terabyte (TB) of both compressed and uncompressed data used for bulk unloading or loading, historical data maintained for File-safe, and database tables.
Snowflake storage costs are calculated monthly based on the average number of on-disk bytes stored each day in your Snowflake account. The exact rate depends on whether your account is Capacity or On-Demand, and also varies by region (e.g. US vs. EU) and platform (e.g. AWS vs. GCP).
Data transfer
While Snowflake doesn’t charge to bring data into your account, it does charge to transfer data from a Snowflake account to a different region, whether on the same or a different cloud platform. It’s important to take this into account when calculating your overall Snowflake costs.
Compute resources
In Snowflake, using compute resources—for performing queries, loading data, or other DML operations—consumes Snowflake credits. There are three types of said resources:
→ Virtual Warehouse Compute consumes Snowflake credits based on seconds spent loading data, executing queries, and performing other DML operations. Warehouses are available in ten sizes, from X-Small to 5XL, each doubling in cost. These only consume Snowflake credits while running, not while suspended or idle, and credit usage per hour directly correlates to the number of servers in a warehouse cluster. What’s more, Snowflake performance is typically linear, so doubling a warehouse’s size usually results in a 50% reduction in a given task’s processing time for the same cost.
→ Serverless Compute describes certain features like Search Optimization and Snowpipe which use Snowflake-managed compute resources instead of virtual warehouses. These resources are automatically scaled up or down for each workload.
→ Cloud Services Compute describes the cloud services layer of Snowflake architecture which consumes credits for tasks like authentication, metadata management, API, SQL, query parsing and access control—if daily consumption of cloud services resources exceeds 10% of daily warehouse usage.
Why is your Snowflake bill larger than expected?
If you’re looking at your Snowflake bill and thinking “Wow, I thought moving to the cloud was supposed to save us money,” you’re not alone. While the cloud can certainly save you money, it isn’t guaranteed to do so. Here are some things you need to watch out for to keep your costs under control:
- Over-provisioning. Unlike on-prem servers, the cloud offers virtually infinite scalability. So while, yes, you can scale down to control spend, the opposite is also true—and there’s no cap on how high you can go. So you’ve traded one over-provisioning problem for another that requires just as active and watchful attention as the previous.
- Under-provisioning at Capacity. If you pre-purchase Snowflake credits for a discount (called Capacity) and go above that amount, you’ll incur a steep price-per-credit increase.
- Lack of visibility into usage. If you don’t have a clear line of sight into usage and cost increases, it can be difficult to control them. That’s why we recently launched our free Snowflake Workload Intelligence tool to give you the visibility you need to manage Snowflake usage.
- Relying on advice, not automated action. Optimization advice is just advice. Someone has to implement it. If you’re relying on a data engineering team that’s already stretched too thin to do this, you’re going to miss opportunities. That’s why we recommend using a Snowflake optimization automation tool like Keebo to do this in the background.
It’s important to keep in mind that because Snowflake pricing is dynamic and often relies on factors outside your control, optimizing your costs isn’t a one-time endeavor. Even if you optimize for today’s state, things change.
Dynamic, automated optimization is the only way to truly keep your Snowflake costs under control and prevent future sticker shock when your next bill comes in.
Final thoughts on keeping your Snowflake bill under control
If you feel like your monthly Snowflake bills are out of control, remember: you don’t have to passively accept these changes. By taking the bull by the horns, as it were, you can proactively optimize your Snowflake spend and minimize costs.
This is exactly what Team Velocity did when they started implementing AI optimization with Keebo. With only 30 minutes of effort, they achieved 36% cost savings, seeing their first results within only 24 hours.
Read the full Team Velocity case study, including how they allocated their freed-up resources, here.
